FIG 4.

Effects of LTα on the level of gB in TG of latently infected mice. WT and LTα^−/− mice were ocularly infected with LAT(+) or LAT(−) virus as described in the legend of Fig. 1. On day 28 p.i., TG were harvested from the surviving latently infected mice. qPCR was performed on each individual mouse TG. In each experiment, the estimated relative copy number of gB was calculated from standard curves generated using pAC-gB1 (79). Briefly, the DNA template first was serially diluted 10-fold so that 5 μl contained from 10³ to 10¹¹ copies of gB and then subjected to TaqMan PCR with the same set of primers. The copy number for each reaction product was determined by comparing the normalized threshold cycle of each sample to the threshold cycle of the standard. GAPDH expression was used to normalize the relative expression of gB DNA in the TG. Each point represents the mean ± standard error of the mean of 20 TG from WT mice infected with LAT(+) or LAT(−) virus, 18 TG from LTα^−/− mice infected with LAT(+) virus, and 20 TG from LTα^−/− mice infected with LAT(−) virus.